Its not a PUMA

I have made this kit available on Cults for a small fee.

https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/game/hind-mi-24a-krokadil

I’ve already assembled all the Hind A’s I’ll ever need but my little exercise into producing my own scale model kit didn’t feel quite finished. What would it be if it never took the form of an actual kit. Not sure where I’m going with this. It may become a thing. It may forever be nothing more than lonely unassembled model kit to be displayed on a shelf or in a dark cupboard. Who knows.

Battle fronts announcement of Red Dawn certainly stirred something in me. As a cold war kid I simply couldn’t resist doing something to celebrate. And though it’s been quite a consuming task and distracted me from achieving little else in the way of hobby it has been extremely satisfying to flex my 3D modeling skills, 3D printer and resin knowledge, and effectively produce my own scale model kit.

I haven’t painted all my Hind-A’s yet. With a sum total of 2 complete Hind-A’s representing all my completed WW3/Team Yankee I think I’ll move on to something else and see what else Battlefront does besides there is a shit tin of proper team Yankee in my pile of shame I’ve yet to look at. Still as far the Hind-As are concerned I’m entertaining Angola, Ethiopian, Afgan, or Nth Vietnam for the other liveries.

The real key is the header pic and then re-watching the movie with finger on the pause button.

All paints are Vallejo. The base is 1/3 Khaki, 1/3 Sand Yellow, 1/3 Bone White, The grey is 2/3 Green Grey, 1/3 Grey Green, and the dark lines are straight black brown

You can spot print lines!

Bit funny realy, I didnt want to any of previous resins to be wasted so pieced them together and got a Company worth. Never quite reached that perfect print but will still see how far I can take it.

My collection of failed and near useless parts grows steadily on but I am making progress.

• I have managed to up the poly count considerably and quite happy with result. There is no visible polies on my print, though I now doubt I’ll get around to increasing the fidelity and detail enough to make it suitable for larger scales. For now the limitation seems to be the 4k resolution of my screen.
• I have hollowed out the tail and main fuselage quite a bit and achieved a good balance when placed on a stand so it’s no longer tail heavy and I’ve saved myself some resin.
• Generaly much better fit of components al round with only as litter further tweaking to a few parts still required

Though I see a lot to be happy with I still have at least 1 round of fixes to get through. Its true that the pieces printed so far would give me the basis of 4 units bar rotors but it would require a lot of filing, sanding and persistence. Besides I need to perfect the model so any future prints are a no brainer.

Changes for next prototype;

1. Getting a tail rotor to print successfully and thicken the main rotor blades just a little
2. Heighten the main rotor axle assembly so it’s clear of the body
3. Move the outward rocket pods inwards
4. Thicken the tail rotor fin and nose gun a little
5. Numerous fitment tweaks and fixes including tail, doors, and magnet recesses
6. Tail skid & antennae

So as I clipped, scraped, blew, and glued my way through my second prototype I thought it would help to put down some notes to assist the next iteration.

1. I am generally happy as a scale modeler of the detail presenting @1/100. The glazing is super cool but wondering if I could do more
2. My model could still do with higher resolution. At this scale it kind of gets away with it but it could do better and I’d like to model it to withstand someone scaling to 32mm (1/48). But this maybe a long term goal.
3. I’ve had to scrape away much material to get a good fit. This may have something to do with my antialiasing setting for this print as I wanted to smooth more of the polys. Generally the antialiasing worked well, though a few details present in the model are difficult to determine. And with too much knife work to get the larger pieces to fit nicely I’ll have to check my tolerances and tweak all male/female fits.
4. Its tail heavy. Though I’ve done some hollowing out, when I put it on a battle front flight stand its noticeably tail heavy and I don’t think magnets alone will cope.

Next steps will be to finish a model with what parts I have and address the above.

So it turns out the weird print bug in my previous post was the beginning of the end for my printer. It’s a story I won’t regale you with here as there is more interesting stuff to talk about ,but I’ll some it up with. Weeks of diagnosis. Heat creep. Non-original parts. Blue smoke.

On the upside. In the place where my FDM printer sat now sits an Elegoo Saturn :yay

While figuring out my printer woes I had had plenty of time to distract myself with a wish list of what might be if I got myself a resin printer and a few points considered were.

1. The reduced print bed so will need to find some convenient cuts.
2. The ability for finer, more detailed parts, ie. Can I make a model for a model maker?
3. The possibilities of clear and translucent resins – unknown and untested
4. And I thought I should remodel generally to remove a lot of the poly flats and encourage curves, upping the resolution.

After a few sessions snatched from the daily grinds I arrived at the pic below, and felt I had a model that would give both landed and flying versions as per Battlefronts, some nice details relevant to the scale and reminiscent of scale modeling and room for some ambitious ideas such as transparent parts for glazing and doors that could be positioned open for landing and door gunners.

The first resin I had tried on my printer was the Elegoo water washable clear blue. (Which I found good, had no real complete fails, just my lack of understanding of small parts. But a lot of contaminated water)

So I while printing tigers, pz4’s and Hanomags amongst other things I put down my Mi-24 glazing components to see how they would go

The initial result left me feeling a bit suspect.

But after a light spray of polyurethane clear gloss (as used on furniture) I think it shows a fair bit of promise. And at this scale, promise is all I’m after. The Hind A was renowned for its glass canopy cockpit and all I’m really after is the knowing that there is detail beyond subject to the suns rays. Also I need to balance the minutia at 1/100. (To me, as an architectural technician that’s pretty much an oxymoron).

The second resin I’m playing with is eSun PLA-Bio and this project is my first print with it

I followed the esun exposure times for the Elegoo Staturn but have slowed my printer down mechanically for all prints to allow for patient peel times. I generally print only Sat and/or Sun nights so can afford a little extra time on my prints and have time for the (hangover) clean up.

So though generaly happy with the 3d model I see some room for exagerating and emboldening a few areas and looking at my printing settings. My first few print attempts failed and I had put them down to the filament I was using. This purple is another filament I havn’t used before and appears to need some more tweaks in the settings to get right.

So in order to meet my first goal I have to achieve 2 things .

Make a virtual ‘solid’ and decide what parts of the battlefront plastic kit I want it to be compatible with.

Typicaly game models are just a colection of 2 dimensional faces that through angle, texture and shaders create the illusion of something solid, possibly even round and smooth. But I need something that will print with real curves and be geometricaly solid with no holes for calculations to leak out. The printer slicing and printing process will smoth out some ‘fractals’ but as I mve through stitching up holes and gaps I’m making a few extra subdivisions and smothing them out to avoid any issues later.

I’m also took a moment to lay battlefronts pieces on a flatbead scanner so I have a reference. My model only needs to match in a general way overall but I do need to acuratly model those areas that might share components such as wing stubs, rotors, and magnets for flight stands.

Right now I’m thinking I will leave modeling compatability for under-carriage till last. Maybe even do a test print and dry fit first to check this is all heading the right direction.

So after the main fueselage was stiched up I dropped it in the slicer to check for errors. The slicer was happy enough with the model but to my mind the resolution just wasn’t where I wanted so I went back and added polies for a couple of hours till I was satified.

Its printing now and and should be ready in about 10hrs for my breakfast.

Today I was talking to a fellow Flames of War player about my Team Yankee Pile of Shame and off the cuff he said, in light of current events, ‘it all felt a bit too real just now’. Which brought us around to Battle Fronts announcement of Red Dawn and how it was maybe a good way of not ‘crossing the streams’ so to speak.

Which reminded me an old project of mine now a decade old.

Over the years my gaming hobby has waxed and waned through its focus and settled on many topics. At times its been all about being a player be it RPG’s, board games or wargaming. And for periods of time its settled on world building or game design or miniature painting.  Many moons ago I moved to new city , had no one to directly game with, and my hobby energy found itself directed at the binary side of gaming. The internet was already a ‘thing’ and as a fan of the mil sim computer game ‘Operation Flashpoint’ I eventualy got hooked into modding the series of mil sim games now known as ‘ArmA’. The culmination of my modding was the creation of a Mi-24 Hind A Krokadil for ArmA2 which has since been revived thanks to others and ported from ArmA 2 to ArmA 3 here on Steam (yes a shameless plug) https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1440194894

I had always remembered as kid that one of the key points of interest for military aficionados watching original Red Dawn was the true nature of that helicopter. The helicopter shown in the movie Red Dawn was a  French SA 330 Puma dressed up to resemble the first version of what we know in the west to be the ‘Hind’, The Mi-24A, before it was upgraded to the ‘D’ version and received the now iconic bubble canopies for the gunner and pilots positions. It was something that had fascinated me as a kid. Then when I saw the abomination of its representation in ‘Call of Duty- Vietnam’ I had to do something. Thus begun my research into the Hind Mi-24 A, and expanding my knowledge of the ins and outs of creating game assets. Game assets isn’t something I do anymore but my work lives on in the ArmA Steam Workshop and I think I would like to see it go a little further.

I’m guessing that Battle front will probably not create a Hind A to match the original movie and simply bring the time line forward a little and use its current model. Its fair I suppose, but its not the same for sentimental old farts like me. ( I haven’t seen the new movie remake so can’t comment on that)

Since recent projects have had me revive a few modeling skills in ‘Blender’ I think it best to make the most of it and rebirth the ‘Mi-24A Krokadil’ yet again, but this time as an STL file for folks to print at 1/100 scale for Team Yankee.

I have a few targets set that I will endeavor to reach but admit this project may take some time.

1. Create a fuselage stl file compatible with existing plastic Mi-24’s from Battlefront for that little touch of refinement
2. Create wings, blades, and weapon racks suitable for FDM machines (sorry I don’t own a resin yet but will hope it works out)
3. Create a range of modifications ie munition types, and landing gear for customisation.